| Monday, June 22… in just a few hours, in Phoenix, Arizona, director Steven Soderbergh and his star, Brad Pitt, will begin work on their latest project, the baseball movie Moneyball. At least, that was the plan, until Columbia Pictures, the studio financing the project, got cold feet and, in a virtually unprecedented move, put the movie into “limited turnaround”… on Friday, 96 hours before filming was due to begin. What that means is quite simple: Soderbergh has a short window to find another studio willing to stump up the reported $50 million budget for the movie, which charts the true story of unorthodox baseball general manager, Billy Beane (Pitt). Warner Bros. and Paramount are reported to be sniffing around the suddenly available movie, but if they don’t bite, then it looks likely that Moneyball will revert back to Sony, where it will either lose Soderbergh, or Pitt, or perhaps both. The trouble appears to have been caused when Columbia chief Amy Pascal read the latest draft of the script, by Soderbergh and Steve Zaillian, and found that it was markedly different from the script she had originally approved, with Soderbergh planning to play around with the film’s structure and insert already-shot interviews with real pro players like Daryl Strawberry into the film’s fictional recount of how Beane revitalised the Oakland A’s fortunes with a revolutionary new financial system. Mind you, Major League Baseball had signed off on the script, but Pascal’s word is apparently final. And, we have to say, utterly baffling. Variety is saying that she and Columbia want a more traditional baseball movie, and are nervous about the budget. Perhaps that’s understandable, especially considering that baseball movies are generally underperformers at the box office. But to hire a director like Soderbergh, and a star like Pitt – both of whom like to experiment and neither of whom, we presume, would be particularly happy making a by-the-numbers baseball movie – and to then deprive them of the opportunity to fully realise their vision is a strange, strange decision. Especially when that decision has been taken so close to the starting date, with cast and crew already in Phoenix, awaiting the first cry of ‘action!’ After all, we reported a short while ago that Soderbergh had cast Strawberry and other pro players, so it’s not like Columbia couldn’t have been aware of the plans to insert interviews into the movie. The plot thickens, and then some… but the best thing for all parties is to hope for a speedy resolution and for another studio to put their Moneyball where their mouth is by scooping up a film that sounds extremely interesting.
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